Social process

by Charles Horton Cooley

Another example is where there is one and only one factor that we can control, and so interest centres upon this, and we regard it as “the cause” of things going one way or another. Thus, if a baby is sick and needs a certain kind of food we may say that the getting or not getting this food is the cause of its living or dying, although its natural vitality, its previous nurture, the character of the disease, and many other conditions enter. This might plausibly be given as a reason for ascribing drunkenness to the saloon; that is, it might be said that the other causes, such as moral weakness, discouragement, lack of better recreation, and the like, were obscure and hard to get at, while the saloon is something that we can abolish.

Now what I wish to say is that personal and social degeneration is not ordinarily due to a wholly exceptional factor breaking in upon a sound process, nor is it often the case that all the factors but one are beyond our reach. Usually many conditions of a more or less unwholesome tendency co-operate, and usually all of these are directly or indirectly within our power to amend. The social process has a degenerate side that is an organic part of it, and tends to break out wherever the better influences are relaxed; and it has also a constructive energy that may be applied wherever we see fit. The man who takes to drink is never morally and physically sound, and it is within our power not only to abolish the saloon but to work upon the economic misery, the bad heredity, and other factors that are of equal importance. To attack one of these conditions and not the others might result in a measure of success, but it would be like the success an army may gain by piercing the enemy’s line at only one point; an attempt to advance farther at this point would be exposed to flank attacks by the enemy on each side. If we repress degenerate factors at but one point they are pretty sure to appear at others, and the only hope of permanent conquest lies in an advance all along the line.

Recently the people of a neighboring city became alarmed at the growth of juvenile crime, and a leading social worker did me the honor to ask my opinion about the matter. He said that the chief of police laid it to idleness; Father L. of the Catholic Charities to unsupervised recreation; Mr. M. of the Boy Scouts to lack of recreation facilities, and Mr. E. of the Boys’ Farm to wrong conditions in the home.

It seemed to me probable that all these conditions and others also had a part in the trouble, and I suggested that a fundamental way to study the question would be to take, say, a hundred typical cases of boys coming before the courts, and have social workers, by gaining their confidence, make an intimate study of their life-histories, trying to see just how the conditions of the city had acted upon their development, and where and why they had gone wrong. The cases would doubtless differ much from one another, and all together would be likely to indicate a whole system of improvements tending to make the community a better place for boys to grow up in. Nothing adequate would be accomplished by working upon any one cause.

I hold, then, that in all studies of degeneracy aiming to be thorough and suggest thorough remedies, the conception of “the cause” should give way to that of organic development. Even accidents, viewed largely, are not isolated causes but the outcome of events which we can understand and control.

It is easy for a person with a particular bias regarding causes of degeneration to present statistics which seem to confirm his view: he has only to display the facts in such a manner as to reveal the operation of the cause in which he is interested, unconsciously concealing the truth that others are equally operative. If he is a student of heredity he will so present matters—and quite honestly, too—that you will wonder you ever thought anything else of much importance; but the next man, armed with facts just as cogent, will give you the same impression regarding education. I suppose there is nothing which more confuses and discourages the amateur student of society than this illusive and contradictory character in what seem to be, and often are, quite trustworthy facts. Unless he can get a commanding and reconciling view, his case, as a thinker, is hopeless.

The practical truth, in all such cases, is that what we are to regard as the cause, if we are to single out any one, is not an absolute matter but relative to the special situation we have to meet. We are justified in selecting any factor which we may hope to control and thus bring about improvement, as the cause for the purpose in hand. If we are discussing eugenic marriage it may be quite proper to say that non-eugenic marriages are the cause of sixty per cent of insanity, provided we can show a probability that this per cent might be eliminated through the control of marriage. At the same time it might be true that sixty per cent could be eliminated by abolishing alcohol and venereal disease, and, again, that sixty per cent might be saved through better education and training—notwithstanding the fact that these three sixties added together are more than the total number of cases. To a great extent these are alternative methods of treatment, any one of which might be effective. It is on the same principle that a man who is suffering from illness brought on by heavy eating, lack of exercise, and hereditary weakness of the digestive organs, might be cured either by less food or more exercise, or, if it were practicable, by getting a better hereditary outfit.

I do not mean to depreciate the statistical study of degeneracy, believing it to be of the utmost value, but its legitimate purpose I take to be to contribute authentic details which the mind can use, along with other facts, to help in forming a true picture of the social process leading up to the condition we are interested in. The particular facts and relations we get in this way are like the detailed studies a landscape-painter makes of trunks of trees, leaves, rocks, and water surfaces, which cannot be put directly into his painting, but which give him a perception of details by the aid of which his constructive vision can produce the whole which he strives to depict. The understanding of a social situation is always such a creative or artistic working of the mind and never a reproduction of statistics as such. I have before me the report of an investigation of the feeble-minded in a certain State, which contains carefully prepared tables and diagrams showing the number and grade of the mentally defective, their sex, age, nativity, ancestry, school progress, delinquency, physical condition, and many other pertinent facts. Such a report is of great value to a capable mind which already has a sound general understanding of the subject, and of its relation to other subjects, but in the lack of these it is of little or no use; it is a raw material which needs a trained imagination to give it form and meaning. If there is any kind of knowledge for which a highly specialized action of the mind suffices, it is not sociology, which always calls for a large synthesis of life.

I think I do not go too far in saying that most current interpretation of statistics is invalidated by inadequate views of the social process as a whole. There is evident need, in practical work, of clearer views of one’s field and of its relation to other fields. The common complaint is of well-intentioned societies and institutions working ahead in a narrow and somewhat futile way for lack of ideas and methods broad as the facts themselves and adequate to effect co-operation. Sometimes vast quantities of precise data are available which illuminate nothing for lack of organizing conceptions. The social process itself being organic, social knowledge must become so in order to deal with it.

If we aim at an understanding of any extended condition of degeneracy, such as the prevalence of crime, vice, and misery in a group, there is nothing adequate, I think, except a precise, sympathetic, and many-sided study of the evolution of the condition, both in individuals and in the group as a whole. All the main factors must be gone into, both in detail and in synthesis. For example, a survey might be made of a degenerate village, or quarter of a city, which should not only describe the actual condition from various points of view, but should trace its history in the same way. And it would not be complete without a collection of typical individual biographies. These should be sympathetic, and should enable us really to understand, in a human way, the course of personal life in its representative varieties. There is much of a kind of formalism which shuns the merely human as sentimental and prefers to rest in the external fact, not seeing that this is always barren without a human interpretation. We are far too complaisant, in my opinion, to that prejudice of the physical scientist which identifies the personal with the vague, and wishes to have as little to do with it as possible. Even psychologists are sometimes guilty of this, which for them is a kind of treason.